Website And Forum Security Alert

[bozodog]

15 March 2005

"...A bug in Google means that when another Google bot finds your real page it attributes all the content on that page to my site and then removes your page from the index because you have duplicate content (a big no no with them) to what it sees as "rightfully" belonging to my site. To be fair it was only doing that if your page's PR was higher than mine (Past tense intentional).

Malicious webmasters soon discovered this was a neat way of nicking all traffic from competing sites which had a lower PR to theirs. And without breaking any laws or search engine guidelines. The barrier to entry is low. Almost anybody can do this and no special spamming or cloaking skills are involved. Simply link to your competitor with a redirect link (302*)...Months later Google is still not acting..."

The rest of the story...

[sultan_emerr]

Thanks for the warning, bozodog

Who was that masked woman?

[martymas]

ive only had google once on my compt and i had a bad experience with it

and since then ive had a bias against it .

cant tell you why i feel like that human nature i suppose .

i found i dont need it .

also once i found that google was keeping tabs on millions of users .

that was it for me .

as example .i was told to type some thing i had posted at techtv.cfh.

well that was scary.54 posts came up.

aand one happened to be me critersizing Mr Bush over the iraq war.

so that scared the s----t out of me.

marty

.

[thesidekickcat]

I am not to keen on Google (bots) getting all the thread/post info on message boards either Marty. But they do it whether we use Google or not. For instance the little bots travel all through message boards looking for new stuff to update Google, so that people searching for something can find whatever we have said about it. I can see good coming from it, for instance when I want an answer to something I Google for it and often it is in a message board thread so the collective intelligence helps us all solve tech or whatever problems.

But it unnerves me to do a search of my screen names and see the tons of posts I have made, which if someone wanted to collect bits and pieces of slips of private info I have put in a post here and a post there etc etc etc they could put together a dossier on me or anyone. So that seems scary to me, and when I remember it I try to be more careful but soon forget it and go back to just posting like it just a few people reading it when it could be anyone or everyone or no one reading it. So it ends up us being a part of the world of message boarding and of search engines collecting it all and that is just the way things are. Compared to those companies, like Choice Point, in the news recently that are letting people steal ids by pretending to use their id data collection services legitimately, I think the little bits and pieces that Google etc bots collect from message board threads/posts is relatively harmless. That is until it is exploited then we all can start to worry again.

As for the original poster's warning here, I still can't figure out what is happening, and what/why Google doesn't fix whatever it is to stop whatever it is from doing waterever they are doing. When I don't understand something, that is the best I can do to say fix the problem Google whatever it is.

God bless everyone.

[echobay]

Who was that masked man?

Thanks for the info Boz...